PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Designing the Perfect Presentation

Tuesday, May 1, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 9:30 am

Carmine Gallo, author of 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators wrote a nice feature for BusinessWeek recently. He sent me this link, and it makes great reading. He’s discussing Duarte Design, a design firm based out of Mountain View headed by Nancy Duarte.

Carmine says, Former Vice-President Al Gore raised the bar on presentation skills with An Inconvenient Truth. But he didn’t do it alone. I wrote a column about the movie when the DVD was released because it demonstrates some very good techniques that we all can apply to our own presentations. At the time, however, I was unaware of the firm behind the presentation: Duarte Design, based in Mountain View, Calif. I sat down recently with one of the firm’s principals, Nancy Duarte, and a group of designers to learn how to turn any presentation into a multimedia powerhouse.

Carmine adds, Listening to Duarte’s designers describe the process they take to develop presentations for corporate clients such as Google, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard left me with a sense of what’s possible in contemporary storytelling.

RibbonCustomizer v1.1 Update

Tuesday, May 1, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 7:16 am

RibbonCustomizer, the add-in product for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows you to customize the tabs within the Ribbon has now been updated to version 1.1. The new update is free for all users. See screenshots later on this page.

New features include:

Classic UI tabs for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word 2007 in English and German.
These are available in the Starter Edition already, and therefore can be used without purchasing RibbonCustomizer.
Vista standard user support: Standard users in Windows Vista can now install and use RibbonCustomizer.
Support for Vista with User Account Control (UAC) turned off. Users with administrative rights were previously unable to use RibbonCustomizer if User Account Control was off.
RibbonCustomizer can now be used with the Office setting requiring application add-ins to be digitally signed.

You will find more info on the RibbonCustomizer site.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Microsoft Office, Patrick Schmid, PowerPoint 2007

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Google Acquires PowerPoint Competitor

Saturday, April 21, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 3:17 am

Filling in a hole in its Google Apps suite, Google has acquired Tonic Systems, which provides a set of tools for the online editing, viewing, and sharing of presentations created with Microsoft PowerPoint. Tonic Systems describes itself as “Java PowerPoint Specialists.” Google says it will incorporate Tonic’s technology into a new presentation service that will be added this summer to Apps.

Articulate Online Announced

Wednesday, April 18, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 9:30 am

Articulate announced Articulate Online, a new user-friendly hosted service that allows you to track how employees, customers and prospects interact with your e-learning courses, assessments, and presentations. This service also integrates seamlessly with Articulate’s other offerings: Articulate Presenter and Articulate Engage, thus allowing easy publish and distribution options.

Classic Menu for Office 2007

Wednesday, April 18, 2007, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 7:33 am

The biggest feature in Microsoft’s new Office 2007 suite is most certainly the interface. Gone are the menus and the toolbars — now all the commands are available in the various tabs of the Ribbon. The Ribbon is much more intuitive — but for seasoned users who have been working with Microsoft Office applications for more than a decade, it does involve a serious amount of unlearning.

An interesting add-in for Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel now brings back the menus and toolbars — all inside a new Ribbon tab called “Menus”! The add-in is called Classic Menu Manager.

Read the Indezine review of Classic Menu for Office 2007.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint 2007

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